Everything that went wrong with SimCity

SimCity is one of the most beloved game franchises in the world, but EA might have burned all that good will when it launched the latest game in the series earlier this year. Right from the start there were serious issues with the gameplay and infrastructure supporting SimCity‘s online components.

Rather than give gamers what they want, EA is selling balloons for $9. Now that we’re a few months out, let’s look at everything that went wrong with this highly awaited release.

Always online is always a problem

SimCity games used to be a solitary experience where you’d lord over your city like a malevolent king, raining destruction at will. Then you could rewind time and do it all over again by loading up a save, or become the kind-hearted, park-loving mayor your city so desperately needed. However, the new SimCity made things a little different and probably less satisfying.

Even when playing alone, players have to be connected to the EA cloud, which autosaves the game and supposedly handles a few other tasks. Having the game automatically saved seems nice, but it makes it hard to obliterate your city for fun. There is no way to go back to a previous save.

It has been said the game engine could manage everything locally, but EA shoehorned in the always-online component to combat piracy. EA disagrees, though.

The always-online requirement is also troublesome for anyone with a sketchy internet connection. Losing the link to EA’s servers for more than 20 minutes will cause the game to automatically shut down. That’s no fun at all, and is downright aggravating when you learn that the online component isn’t really necessary for the game to run.

Is it fixed yet? No, and don’t expect it to be. EA is pretty serious about the online components whether or not it was originally devised to combat piracy.

Massive server congestion

Maybe if the crazy online component of SimCity had worked at launch, people would be less upset. For weeks after the game went live, gamers were stuck waiting in line to play a single player game — there simply wasn’t enough server capacity to accommodate everyone. EA had to turn off features just to get the game running.

Even when the servers were allegedly working, players often reported mysterious disconnections that made the game borderline unplayable. These issues left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Despite EA getting the server load under control, you’d never know it from a quick Google search. All you see is complaints from the launch window.

Is it fixed yet? For the most part, yes. The servers are beefier and available in all regions. You can see the status online (US).

Sims less simulated than first advertised

EA really talked up the AI in SimCity prior to release. We were told that you could actually track your little sim people throughout the day. They had jobs, lives, homes, and you could watch it all happen! Well, they’re still working the kinks out.

The sims (or agents) don’t actually operate like individual beings. For example, when an agent leaves home in the morning, it simply goes to the nearest compatible open job available at the time. It doesn’t matter where it worked the previous day. Later, it leaves the job location and goes to the nearest unoccupied home. This matters because it causes businesses in certain areas to suffer because of the layout of roads, not the quality of the location.

The AI was strangely broken in multiple ways at launch, as well. The game was unable to route traffic properly, even with sufficient road capacity. Sims would take the shortest path from A to B, even if that meant ignoring the four-lane superhighway and driving single-file across a field.